I will explain this pattern in a moment, but first I will say I have only seen this pattern a couple of times before. This pattern indicates imminent death for the newsgroup, mail list, or community website. I am posting this to test my prediction: LtU’s death is certain.
History
Highly technical newsgroups, mail lists, and web communities start off with a (small) excited family of founders interested in a specific domain. In the case of LtU, it is the domain of programming language theory. This family explores the defined domain, sharing technical articles, participating in interesting discussions, and combining the newly discovered ideas in ways new to them. Along the way they teach themselves and maybe some others (experts) along the way. But over time, the combined archives accumulate close to all the relevant papers, and all that needs to be said on that domain. The founders and experts start to have a difficult time finding ideas that simulate their imagination like they experienced in the past. Discussion amoung the founders and experts stagnate.
Meanwhile, the community collects many members. Most are interested in the topic, but not to the extent the founders and experts are. Some see the community an opportunity to learn more (newbies), and others see it as peripheral to what interests them more (trolls), and others just listen to the interesting things being posted (lurkers). In any case, this larger community will contribute questions and ideas that are mostly off-topic. So long as the discussion between the founders and experts produces enough new material, and the relative number of newbies and trolls is small, the community stays vibrant. Unfortunately, the growth of the off-topic community, combined with the increasing difficulty of the founders and experts to produce stimulating content eventually tips the balance from mostly on-topic to mostly off-topic.
The founders and experts are rightly dismayed at the large amount of “low quality” community discussion. This leads to the meta discussion…
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3219
…and then the collapse. The founders are unable to recognize the finiteness of their domain. Like a drug, they wait patiently for some new exciting concept to discuss. Meanwhile they prevent or discourage “off-topic” discussion. The lack of new content kills the community. The number of members drops off precipitously, and the community dies. The community leaves behind an archive and/or a wiki, with one or two diehard maintainers.
Problem Analysis
Community collapse is not inevitable. In my view there are three issues conspiring to destroy the community. Removing any one of these issues allows the community to stay alive.
- The domain is finite
- The number of experts is too small.
- The experts do not want to re-discuss issues
Expand the Domain – The finiteness of the discussion domain is the biggest reason there is a problem. The community/website must expand to include the prevalent off-topic themes. Hopefully the founders and experts have interest in these new topics, because I imagine the community will need to help to clearly define the new topics, and police them appropriately. The chances of a community expanding instead of collapsing is rare; the founders and experts need to play a larger role in moderation as the amount of discussion grows. Even if new moderators are recruited, founders and experts must realize there will be more discussion than they can digest.
I believe this was the direction took by the many (public) technical forums out there. I admit these may not have been born from academic-level community, but behind those sites is the discipline to support diverse and, admittedly, non-technical discussion.
Increase the Number of Experts – The community is in crisis because there are not enough on-topic posts. If the number of experts is increased, the number of posts should increase also. The problem with this solution is that there are not enough active experts. If there are, then they are usually found in academia publishing peer-reviewed papers, in which case they already have their own community: with journals and meetings, far superior to internet discussion.
Maintaining expertise of the members, and the quality of the discussion, has be done, and it takes the form of academic communities. The discussion is not intense because the reality is there is not many new things coming out of any one domain. For now, the best a community can do is distribute the papers of real experts. Maybe in time the major journals will start their own forums: Posting allowed only by invitation, of course.
Keep experts excited – Any one person will eventually loose interest in a fixed domain, therefore a consistent stream of new experts is required to replace the old. This means the founders and old-guard experts must stand down and pass the discussion on to a new generation of experts. This will inevitably result in many re-discussions of old topics, but the community will stay alive discussing past topics while waiting for the occasional new idea to arrive. As with all re-birth, do not be surprised if the offspring does not resemble the parent. How many founders would allow that to happen to their pet project?
I have seen successful handoffs before; the current experts do not have the time to maintain the list. I have seen the discussion change as the priorities of the new experts dominated the discussion. Problem is that the next generation of experts can not release control; and the community collapses eventually anyway.
Conclusion
I will put a line in the sand, if only to test my abilities of prognostication: LtU does not have the will or resources to expand it’s website to include a more diverse set if discussions. LtU can not try to compete with academia’s clearly superior quality discussion. LtU moderators can not stomach releasing control the hoards of off-topic trolls.
The LtU community is about to die.